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Big success for our “CMMI meets industry” event on March 19, with about 90 participants. We are very happy with the positive feedback. Thanks to Biowin, the TTO, the AVRE, our sponsors Zeiss, Bruker and BioSPX, and congratulations to the entire CMMI team for their contributions !

Our colleague Isabelle Salmon is invited speaker at the 4th Digital Pathology Congress in London, 30 Nov – 1 Dec. She will give her practical point of view on going digital for surgical pathology second opinion.

The CMMI is happy to announce the publication of a study led by our colleagues of the Molecular Physiology of the Cell lab of the ULB.Congratulations to Céline Barthelemy, Abdoulaye Oury BARRY and Bruno André as well as to our deputy director Laure Twyffels who contributed to the confocal fluorescence microscopy part.

The study explores the effect of the anticancer agent FTY720 on yeast and human cells. FTY720 was already known to “starve cancer cells to death” (10.1002/1873-3468.12121). The present study better explains how: it shows that FTY720 reduces the activity of several plasma membrane amino acids permeases. This decreases the ability of cells to import amino acids, which, in turn, triggers a positive feed-back mechanism that leads to the endocytosis of these permeases via the inhibition of TORC1, and a further decrease in amino acid import capability.

Thanks to the continued support of the Walloon Region and the ERDF, the CMMI will soon propose cryo-TEM services to its academic and industrial partners.

We are therefore very happy to share that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”. We too find that it is a “super cool” technology (☺!)

Humans are protected against African trypanosomes by the serum protein APOL1; however, Trypanosoma rhodesiense and Trypanosoma gambiense neutralize this defense and cause sleeping sickness. Fontaine et al. found that APOL3 is also able to kill both species and consequently engineered a therapeutic version of APOL1 that eradicates infection by T. gambiense in mice.